The Global Positioning System, more commonly known as GPS, is a space based navigation system that provides location and time information in any weather conditions anywhere in the world within the unobstructed view of the several GPS satellites. This technology was created in the United States for military purposes during the early 1970s and continues to be maintained by them however, since 1999 it has been freely accessible for anyone with GPS receivers.
With the availability of GPS to the civilian population, there has been a large but steady increase in the usage of the Global Positioning System over the last 15 years. The development and utilization of this technology paved its path to creating its own multi-billion dollar industry comprising of a wide variety of applications for farming, construction, transportation, aerospace, health and safety which is estimated to grow up to $26.7 billion in 2016 and eventually become worth much more in the coming years.
The significant potential of the industry’s future is highly inevitable due to the growing world population and developing towns, cities and countries. Some of the technology such as augmented reality, touch less gestures, voice enable commands, use of telematics in the automotive sector has also increased the scope of the overall GPS market. The global GPS market is segmented on the basis of its application and type. On the basis of type, the GPS market is divided into automotive, marine, aviation, GPS enabled mobile phones and GPS cameras. This market is divided into traffic control, navigation and position tracking in logistics and security on the basis of its application. Further the market is subdivided into robotics, traffic control, agriculture and other applications.
This industry is likely to evolve and advance as well as it did in the last decade wherein the GPS hardware market have been gradually decreasing through the years transitioning more into the software sector, a major growing market to date. There may be multiple factors causing this growth, decline and shift in the usership/loyalty and buying patterns of users such as lifestyle, quality, or even new GPS platforms (wearables like Smart Glasses and Watches by Google and in-dash systems for cars) however, the main culprit has been convenience of having everything a person needs all in one as mobile (smartphones, androids, etc.) and portable handheld devices (tablets, PDA, etc.) have been one of the fastest growing industries reaching nearly every market due to its importance and necessity in the modern age.